Latest Microsoft Blogs

I hope you've updated to Visual Studio 2012.2 and picked up Web Essentials because we're continuing to add goodness all the time. As we march forward with the One ASP.NET vision , so does the community. One of the major goals has been to make it easier for the community to not only make templates but also live alongside ASP.NET templates as peers. This has been historically hard. It's still too complex, in fact, but it's easier than before . I'm hoping that one day soon making templates will be as easy as making and sharing NuGet packages . Not only is most of ASP.NET open source , but so are the Azure SDKs, NuGet and more. However, there's a large and rich world of open source frameworks and projects that some companies...

ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 is coming soon , and one of the features is support for Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Facebook logins out of the box with ASP.NET templates. I show how OAuth in ASP.NET works in this 5 minute video . We are also continuing to look at ways to make membership easier in coming versions of ASP.NET. Mozilla has a new identity system called Mozilla Persona that use browserid technology to let users log in to your site without creating a custom login or username. I wanted to see how Persona would work in ASP.NET and hacked up a prototype (with some sanity checking from my buddy Hao Kung). There's some comments and some TODOs, but it's a decent proof of concept. First, I read the Mozilla Persona Developer docs and...

I've got this little one page website I wrote a few years ago that attempts to detect the version of the .NET Framework you have and give you a download for the smallest redist you need to get up to date. It's called SmallestDotNet .  It was written and thrown up while watching an hour of TV. Fortunately or unfortunately this little throwaway still gets about 10,000 page views a month. It also has a tiny JSON API that a lot of people have actually embedded into their sites and products. Additionally, it's starting to break. IE9+ doesn't include .NET Framework details in its HTTP User-Agent. The site isn't setup for .NET 4.5, etc. You get the idea. Plus, it's a pile of if statements and prayer and it's just horrible...

Did you notice the release of WebMatrix 2 ? WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool introduced in 2010 . It's focus is on simplifying the web development experience for ASP.NET and PHP, and more recently node. Rob Conery actually turned me onto WebMatrix and we use it for the This Developer's Life Podcast website. I recommend it for students, designers, and web pros that either don't need or don't want the whole Visual Studio experience. It's also a nice companion to Sublime Text 2. There's even Git extensions, LESS, easy deployment and more for the front end developer. If you want to download WebMatrix 2 and get started, it's free . It will use the Web Platform installer to install and you can use it...

Did you enjoy my recent post on ASP.NET MVC DisplayTemplate and EditorTemplates for Entity Framework DbGeography Spatial Types and it's associated GIANT URL? Modeling Binding and EditorTemplates...for ASP.NET Web Forms? DisplayTemplates and EditorTemplates are a great way in ASP.NET MVC to keep things DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself.) That means I can just write EditorFor() calls like this: @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Location) See how I didn't say "TextBoxFor" or "MapFor"? You say EditorFor and it makes the right choice. If the type is called DbGeography then it will look for a Editor Template at ~/Shared/EditorTemplates/DbGeography.cshtml. It's a nice feature of ASP.NET MVC that folks don't use enough...

I've said before how surprised I am that more ASP.NET Web Forms developers don't use Routing to make their URLs prettier . If you don't want "foo.aspx" in your URL, then change it with Routes.MapPageRoute(). However, managing Routing Tables is a little tedious and most WebForms folks aren't used to the concept and don't want to invest the time. I've also heard a number of ASP.NET Web Forms Developers express a little envy at how easy it is to make a site that has both desktop and mobile views using ASP.NET MVC . They like the idea of seeing an iPhone show up and showing a different  view while reusing logic as I've shown in my mobile talks before . Let's solve both these problems with a new ASP...

Recently in on a post on the RESTful ASP.NET Web API framework I used curl to post JSON to an HTTP endpoint: curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{ Name: 'Scott Guthrie', Age: 67}" Curl is lovely and should be in your c:\utils folder and more importantly in your PATH. I have a UTILS folder in my Dropbox and in the PATH on all my machines. Whenever I find a useful no-install utility I put it in there. Curl is great but it's still confusing enough to me that I don't use it enough. It's slightly obscure command-line switches are keeping me from using it on a regular basis. For HTTP work there is a better utility called HTTPie at http://httpie.org . (It has nothing to do with IE (Internet Explorer...

Jason Zander announced today that Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 is RELEASED to web. The .NET Web Tools Team (the team I'm on) has coverage on their blog as well . I thought I'd showcase some Tiny Happy Features that the team worked on just because it made life better. Some are large some are small, but all are tiny happy features. I'll continue for a few more Tiny Happy Features over the next few weeks but this last week I took some time and recorded 13 (ya, thirteen, oy) short videos to show you guys these features in action. These are SHORT videos that are at most 4 to 6 minutes. It's hard to watch 60 to 90 minute screencast so I did these little one-take quick shots so you could watch them at lunch. If you watch...

At some point soon lots of people are going to start writing these epic blog posts about Visual Studio 2012. They will include LOTS of screenshots ( some good and some bad ), some small code samples and minimal context. I can't speak for other teams; I can only talk about what we worked on. The <AngleBrackets/> folks in Azure Platform and Tools (ASP.NET, IIS, WCF, EF, Azure much and more) have been putting a lot of work into what I sometimes call "Death by a Thousand Tiny Cuts." It's the little irritants that are as frustrating (or more so) as the big missing features. Rather than a giant super post (although I'll do that at some point) I thought I'd showcase some Tiny Happy Features that the team worked on just...

There's lots of goodness happening in the .NET and ASP.NET community right now. If you're not plugged in, you can follow ASP .NET on Twitter or Like ASP.NET on Facebook and we'll keep you up to date with all the great goings-in. You can visit, bookmark and subscribe to the newly revamped and oft-updated ASP.NET website . The new site is lovely on various phones and pads and has loads of content, both textual and video as well as HOURS of free training videos from Pluralsight. There's also an excellent Daily Community Spotlight on the home page there you can also subscribe to in Google Reader that is curated by our very own Jon Galloway . The ASP.NET Webstack is Open Source now as is the Entity Framework . There's goodness...